Yuri is a haunted man. His eyes have that wary look of a veteran who saw too much horror and who now suffers nightmares and insomnia in equal measure. His face twitches and he scratches nervously as he talks. For three years in the Soviet paratroops he was a hunter-killer in Afghanistan, a hit man dropped behind enemy lines to take out heavily armed convoys creeping along the roads of the Hindu Kush mountains.
The mojaheddin could never catch him, and he always made it home. Tonight, however, over sour vodka and shaschlyk, he admits the experience terrified him and that he wet himself on every jump he made. After several hours of downing neat vodka, Yuri is also very drunk. After being badly burned inside an exploding truck, he was invalided out of the Soviet army, convalesced in his native Ukraine and then as a reward for his valour … sent to Manchester to study English.
And clearly Manchester still has a grip on his imagination. Manchester United. In Vietnam. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Vietnam is a mecca for ex-Soviet citizens such as Yuri. Over 2, former Soviet citizens, Russians, Ukrainians and even Chechens, live in the southern Vietnamese port town of Vung Tau, working for Vietsovpetro, a huge Brezhnev-era oil monolith that refuses to die.
A sort of Clacton-on-the-South-China-Sea. Luxury hotels lining beach front boulevards entertained the likes of Somerset Maugham and Margerite Duras during the roaring 20s and 30s. But after all the wars, revolutions and occupying American GIs, today the Grande Dame of the Indochina beaches looks more like a haggard old bag lady up for some spare change.
Most of the tamarind-lined boulevards and stucco French villas are now gone, replaced by crumbling Soviet-era, brieze-block hotels and shops emblazoned with Russian Cyrilic script. The ruined, potholed roads are jammed with tatty old Ladas and Skodas belching fumes from their two-stroke engines. Cafes line the streets selling borsht and Siberian dumplings, while bars sell vodka poured by Russian-speaking Vietnamese prostitutes. They live quiet, suburban lives in the safety of a vulgar, slate grey enclave called the Russian village that could be any Stalinist-era housing estate from Volgograd to Vladivostock.
